


Out Of The Shadows

by FictionPenned



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alex asked why we even have this lever, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23792482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: A tear shines on Yaz’s cheek, deep blue in the shadowed light of the room. The Doctor shoves her hands in her pockets and turns away, pretending that she did not see it, but it waters the sorrowful vines that have already wound tightly around her twin hearts. They grow a bit larger, pull a bit tighter, and for a second, she forgets how to breathe. The world spins and she catches herself on the console, wrapping shaking fingers around its edge.A hard swallow contracts her throat. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”Just a little thing written for the Thirteen Fanzine weekly prompt for the week of April 18th: Shadows
Relationships: The Doctor/Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 6
Kudos: 47





	Out Of The Shadows

Most days, the TARDIS is awash with light and sound. Warm, golden light washes across a thousand rooms, humming fills the air, and the ship lives and breathes and weaves stories of hope and dreams and adventures beyond the imagination. Those days are the best days. They are the days when the Doctor can laugh and smile and forget the centuries of love and loss and bloodshed that haunt her footsteps.  
  
Some days, however, the TARDIS goes dark. The engines fade into silence, the comforting yellow light gives way to a deep blue steeped in grief, and shadows slither from their corners and grow until they dominate the unfathomable space within. Those days are the hardest days. They are the days that speak of impossible choices and the grief that follows them. They are the days that sit heavy in the Doctor’s hearts for centuries. They are the days when the very color of the universe seems to change.  
  
The Doctor sits on the stairs in the console room, bracing an elbow on the inside of her knee. Her eyes track the movement of her hand as she curls her fingers into a fist, contracting and relaxing muscles and tendons with a degree of repetition that ought to be soothing but isn’t. She hasn’t said goodbye yet, but she is already grieving.  
  
An eternity passes before another person steps into the cold darkness of the console room. The lovely scent of Yaz’s perfume drifts across the room, her feet dance on the floor in an all-too-familiar rhythm, and it is almost enough to scare the Doctor away from the task entirely. She steels herself with a deep breath before she lends her voice to a dreaded set of words.  
  
“I need you to get out.”  
  
Yaz turns, dark hair flying. Pain and confusion wash across her face in an unsteady wave. “What?”  
  
The Time Lord swallows, lifting her chin as a muscle in her jaw tightens. “Out, Yaz. I need you to leave. Now.”  
  
Booted feet step forward, and beneath them, the honeycombed lights pulse slightly in the too-fast rhythm of the Doctor’s heartbeats. “What are you talking about, _out_ ? You invited me here. You told me I could see the universe. You told me we were _friends_ . You can’t take that away.” Her voice breaks slightly, catching on the jagged edges of her throat, but she attempts to soldier on, “You never --”  
  
The Doctor’s gaze hardens, her fist tightens, and she rises to her feet -- an ancient figure cloaked in shadows. “You broke the rules. You took a life, and you put yours in danger.”  
  
A disbelieving laugh spins off Yaz’s lips and sends a shiver down the Doctor’s spine. “What, it’s okay when you do it, but it’s not okay when I do it?”  
  
She expects to unseat the Doctor, expects her to backpedal, expects to slam against a weak point in the argument and watch the entire thing shatter, but the Doctor calmly says, “Yes.”  
  
Yaz closes the space between them until it’s negligible, staring up at the Doctor with uncontrollable rage. “That’s not fair, you know.”  
  
The Doctor’s tongue swipes across her lips, betraying the nerves that undercut the confidence that she is attempting to project. She cannot let Yaz see her stumble. This decision is not up for debate. This is a decision spoken from atop the insurmountable peak upon which she sits. She is the Oncoming Storm, the only one of her kind, a person who has seen more and lived longer than Yaz could possibly imagine, and in this TARDIS, her word is law. “I don’t care about fair. Not right now.”  
  
“You used to care. What happened to ‘sorting out fair play throughout the universe’ and all that? Was that just for show? Just a lie you tell us to string us along until you’re tired of us? You set out rules and then you change them. One day rule one is ‘nobody snog Byron’ and the next it’s ‘if you touch a gun, I’ll never speak to you again.’ How’s anyone supposed to follow that?” Her voice rises with each successive word until she’s practically shouting into the Doctor’s face, and the Doctor flinches as every syllable strikes against her exposed nerves. “People are supposed to get warnings and all that. What happened to those?”  
  
“You’ve had plenty of warnings.” Green eyes burn, and the words are both sharp and dangerously quiet. “Or did you expect something clearer than _almost dying_? Should I have made signs? Kept a chart? Made you sit in a chair and think about what you did until you said you were sorry?”  
  
Yaz bristles. “I’m not a child, Doctor. I made my choices, and I stand by them. I did what I thought was right. If you don’t like it, _fine_ , but don’t turn this into a bigger deal than it is.”  
  
Yaz leans forward, and the Doctor sidesteps her in an attempt to slip past -- seeking to build space between them and fill it with shadows and words and walls that keep her from feeling the pain that radiates from every pore of the woman’s skin -- but a hand on her wrist stops her. She wrenches it away with a quick jerk of her elbow, breaking the contact.  
  
“Don’t touch me, Yaz.”  
  
“Don’t walk away from me then. Not now. Not ever.”  
  
A tear shines on Yaz’s cheek, deep blue in the shadowed light of the room. The Doctor shoves her hands in her pockets and turns away, pretending that she did not see it, but it waters the sorrowful vines that have already wound tightly around her twin hearts. They grow a bit larger, pull a bit tighter, and for a second, she forgets how to breathe. The world spins and she catches herself on the console, wrapping shaking fingers around its edge.  
  
A hard swallow contracts in her throat. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”  
  
“I’m making this harder than it has to be? What about _you_ ?” Yaz is shouting again -- young, indignant, the picture of every young woman who has ever challenged the Doctor in this space. Therein lies the problem, really. The Doctor has seen this happen before. She welcomes people into her life and her TARDIS, holds them in her hearts, and then watches them spiral towards recklessness and arrogance and all the things that tend to get them killed.  
  
Yaz dared to take a life herself.  
  
Yaz placed a value on the life of another person.  
  
And Yaz lost sight of her own.  
  
Once her companions lose themselves in the universe and the insidious pull of her own influence, the Doctor can never, ever bring them back. She’s tried and failed a dozen times before. She’s not going to fail again. She can’t live with that. She’d rather live with a premature ending than a tragic one. She lost the first face that this face saw, and she will not stand idly by and watch any more people who were on that train die.  
  
Especially not Yaz.  
  
Never Yaz.  
  
“I asked you to leave,” the Doctor repeats.  
  
“And I’m telling you no.” Yaz stalks across the floor, coming to hover at the Doctor’s shoulder. Her energy is electric in the quiet room, strong and tangible enough to replace the hum of the engines.  
  
“You don’t get a say.”  
  
Yaz’s lip curls. “Since _when_ ?”  
  
“Since _always_ .” The Doctor shakes her hair out of her face and meets the woman’s gaze with a firm stare, daring Yaz to challenge her further. She will open those doors and throw her out herself if she has to. She’s done worse in her lifetime. She’s murdered planets and toppled gods and stood by while entire civilizations fell to ruin. She is more than willing to do what it takes to protect a person that she loves from the horrible, inexorable shadow of her own influence.  
  
After all, this is her fault, not Yaz’s. It’s always her fault when things go badly. Even when she tries to do the right things, she always seems to stumble into the wrong ones. She may not be able to wash the blood from Yaz’s hands, but she can keep it from multiplying, and she can keep Yaz’s own from joining the mix.  
  
“I don’t believe this.” That twisted laugh strikes again, a rude facsimile of Yaz’s usual bright nature.  
  
“Start believing.”  
  
“Why are you doing this? I have a hard time believing that you’re better off alone. Lonely alien, wandering the universe, sticking her nose in to save it with no one to pull her out when things go a bit too far. Without me you would’ve died. Everyone would’ve died. What do you stand to gain by kicking me out because I decided one person deserved to die?”  
  
The Doctor stays silent, bracing her palms against the steadying surface of the console as she tries to dull her simmering frustration with a few deep breaths.  
  
“ _Doctor_ ,” Yaz insists.  
  
An interfering hand settles on the Time Lord’s shoulder and she tears her gaze away from the console. Eyes meet eyes and pain meets pain, mixing and mingling amidst the insatiable press of the darkness. “I’m saving you.”  
  
Yaz digs her heels in even further. “I don’t need to be saved.”  
  
“You may not want to, but you need to.” The words are firm, intended as a defensive front against further prying, but it falters beneath the next onslaught.  
  
“What gives you the right to decide what’s best for me?”  
  
The dam holding the Doctor’s emotions at bay breaks, and centuries’ worth of pain gathers in a glimmer of tears and a burst of sound. “I love you.”  
  
Silence falls between them, cut only by the harried beating of three hearts.  
  
Yaz even stops breathing.  
  
The Doctor doesn’t dare guess what she might be thinking, doesn’t dare contemplate what she might be feeling, doesn’t dare meet her eyes. She allows herself to be carried away by the rushing river of her own pain as she sketches the picture of her fear.  
  
“You deserve better than me, Yasmin Khan. I take people and I break them. I put them in danger, they lose family and friends and sometimes their entire homes. People have died, Yaz. I’ve watched them die. I’ve stepped forwards when I should have stepped backwards and I’ve _let them die_ . I’ve watched normal people harden into soldiers. I’ve let them kill for me because I wouldn’t dare do it myself, and I won’t let another person be a victim. Get out while you still have the chance to leave. It’s better this way. Trust me.”  
  
Yaz regains control of her lungs, and the set of her mouth tightens. “No.”  
  
“I said that this isn’t up for discussion.”  
  
Her head tilts, brushing up against the shrug of a single shoulder “You might’ve said that. Doesn’t make you right, though.”  
  
“Yaz…” The Doctor doesn’t have a chance to finish the thought before her companion cuts her short.  
  
“No. You think your love is the only love that matters? That you get the right to dictate your life in mind simply because you’re older or wiser or an alien with a police box? I love this life. I love _you_ . I love all of it, good and bad, and I’m not ready to give it up. You can pry it from my cold, dead hands if you want to, but I’m not leaving.”  
  
Blood rushes to the Doctor’s head. “You don’t know --”  
  
“I _do_ know. If I’m wrong, fine. Let me live with the consequences of my actions, but don’t rewrite the rules. Don’t take the choice from me. You chose your life. Let me choose mine.”  
  
Yaz reaches out a hand, resting it on top of the Doctor’s tense fingers. Her touch is warm, shockingly steady, and slightly damp from the sheen of sweat that marks her lingering rage.  
  
The Doctor flinches, but she does not pull away. Her teeth dig into her bottom lip as a thousand possible futures spin their truths across the front of her mind. They all end badly, but all futures end badly when one has the misfortune of being an ageless creature with a tendency to get overly attached to short-lived humans. She doesn’t want to give into Yaz’s will, doesn’t want to surrender control, doesn’t want to let things play out as they will -- but if she’s trying to be a better person, then she has to admit when she’s wrong, and she is horribly, dreadfully wrong. The Time Lords built their society on robbing other people of their agency, and though she has distanced herself from them for millennia, she has not yet managed to shake the entirety of their influence.  
  
This is her chance to take another step away from the hated, vile practices of her people and embrace the traits she admires in humans. Forgiveness. Open-mindedness. A willingness to change.  
  
However, it does not mean that she’ll tolerate other people becoming murderers on her account. It does not mean that she won’t do everything in her power to keep Yaz safe. It just means that she will not overstep her bounds.  
  
The suffocating silence reigns uncontested as the Doctor wavers between the right decision and the easy one. When the Time Lord finally dares to speak, the words are careful and clear, and her eyes doggedly avoid Yaz’s eager stare. “If you stay, then there needs to be a new rule.”  
  
Relief swims into the air between them as Yaz reaches out and grasps at the newfound hope. The Doctor doesn't share that relief, but she is aware of it, and that awareness takes some of the edge off her pain.  
  
“You're going to let me stay?"  
  
"Maybe. If you follow the new rule." The Doctor restates.  
  
"And what’s that?” Yaz edges closer.  
  
The Doctor can feel her breath on her shoulder, and her eyes slide sideways as she states, “The rules are nonnegotiable.”  
  
The floor pulses beneath their feet. “And if I break it?”  
  
The Doctor inhales sharply, fighting against the deeply ingrained lessons of her youth. “Then we sit down and have a chat about it and decide where to go from there.”  
  
Yaz accepts it. It’s more than she could have wished for. Fear and dread and worry flee from her body in a rush of pure, unbridled joy, and the Doctor can’t help but catch some of it, though it does not chase away all the shadows that curl in her blood.  
  
“I have a rule, too,” Yaz says.  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“Deals have to be sealed with kisses.” It’s a silly thing for her to say given the weight of the conversation that preceded it, and she is about to say as much, but when the Doctor looks at her with love and sadness and beauty, it no longer feels that silly at all.  
  
It feels _right_.   
  
More right than anything else in the universe, even the choices that she so stubbornly defended.   
  
For a moment, the Doctor hesitates. She's tempted to offer up another excuse in a long line of excuses, but she's brushed aside Yaz with promises of 'Another time' for far too long now. Another time is bound to happen sometime, and that sometime might as well be now, while they're perched on the edge of forgiveness with claims of love still echoing in their hearts. 

"Done."  
  
Lips meet. Hands press into hips and cheeks and backs, and the TARDIS springs to life around them, washing them in gold and warmth, chasing away the last of the shadows, and filling the air with a hum that sounds like music.


End file.
